What is Intelligent Contract Management? A Beginner's Guide

Contracts are fundamental to business operations yet managing them efficiently remains a challenge. Traditional contract lifecycle management (CLM) systems often focus on document storage rather than extracting actionable insights.  Intelligent Contract Management (ICM) is an advanced AI-driven approach from intake to insights, that goes beyond traditional CLM to an AI-first, industry-informed intelligent contract management process.

^{What is Intelligent Contract Management}  

Intelligent Contract Management (ICM) combines advanced technologies for a streamlined contract lifecycle and performance management. ICM includes Intelligent Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) and Intelligent Contract Performance Management (CPM) enhancing processes and outcomes. While the Intelligent CLM utilizes agentic AI capabilities, facilitates processes from intake to storage, enables policy-driven "redlining”, and provides self-service access for users, the Intelligent CPM utilizes AI for extracting key terms, conducting risk analysis, and ensuring real-time compliance with policies. Both components emphasize integration with existing systems and aim to enhance operational efficiency and visibility in contract management.

Unlike conventional CLM platforms, which often serve as document repositories, Intelligent Contract Management Platform facilitates an industry-informed intake-to-insights process and uses AI to extract strategic, business, and compliance insights hidden in layers and hierarchies of agreements and contracts. It greatly helps in maximizing business value from every negotiated contract, unlocking massive savings opportunities for enterprises!

^{Traditional CLM Platforms: Challenges}

Traditional CLM platforms primarily serve as repositories for contract storage and retrieval. Challenges include but not limited to:

• Traditional CLM platforms are optimized for intake-to-storage and legal team operations but struggle with missed opportunities for procurement and finance jobs-to-be-done.  

• Contains hidden insights in hierarchies and layers of agreements and contracts, unable to extract and act upon strategic, financial, and compliance insights from complex contracts.

• Unable to reduce low-value workload such as Q&A and contract drafting to allow focus on high-value risk mitigation, negotiations, value extraction.

• Lacks flexibility in data structures and automation in workflows, unable to keep up with enterprise-grade workflow requirements and industry-specific use cases

^{Digital Assistants}

ICM uses advanced capabilities of role-specific AI assistants that are highly proactive, in contrast to traditional AI agentic platforms like GenAI or ML models that work reactively based on mandatory units such as prompts or any commands pretrained.

These contracting assistants are intelligent AI-colleagues for legal and procurement teams, that automatically engage with contracting workflows, processes, leading to enhanced productivity and efficiency in the ecosystem. In a way, AI contracting assistants help in augmenting legal and procurement teams in varied ways, for instance, collaborating online with various departments for simultaneous reviewing, parallel approvals that leads to a faster contract execution process.  

^{SimpliContract’s Intelligent Contract Management}  

SimpliContract’s Intelligent Contract Management platform is equipped with state–of- the- art Intelligent CLM and Intelligent CPM that can seamlessly handle complex processes, streamline workflows in end-to-end contracting lifecycles. It leverages the advanced AI capabilities of goal-specific AI assistants to automate tasks, streamlining contracting processes for enterprise procurement and legal leaders. The intelligent system allows seamless integration with varied platforms such as Sap Ariba, Coupa, Salesforce CRM, Google workspace, etc., allowing organizations to optimize contract performance while ensuring compliance with regulatory and corporate policies.

SimpliContract's ICM leverages AI to identify contractual savings, mitigate risks, and streamline workflows, offering a comprehensive intake-to-insights process that uncovers valuable insights from complex agreements, unlike traditional contract lifecycle management solutions.

^{Intelligent CLM}

Features

• AI assistants execute intake to storage process  

• AI-powered "redlining" per business policy  

• Configurable, industry-specific, enterprise-grade workflows with secure, role-based access and granular permissions  

• Self-service NextGen AI interface for business users to get answers to legal and contract queries  

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Benefits

• Free up to 70% of the legal team's time by offloading mundane tasks to AI assistants and equipping business teams with AI-powered self-service  

• Reduce contract turnaround time (TAT) by 65%

^{Intelligent CPM}

Features

• AI assistants like data explorer and risk analyzer, for clause, key terms, and KPI extraction; risk analysis; contract summarization  

• Business architecture that maps obligations to operational processes and policies  

• Real time policy validation and regulatory alignment  

• Contract data integration into systems of record (ERPs, procure to pay, CRMs, etc.)  

• Spend tracking, AI-powered savings recommendations, obligation identification  

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Benefits

• Helps procurement teams get a holistic view of terms and uses AI-assistants to extract strategic, business, and compliance insights across multi-year layers and hierarchies of contracts

• Find new contractual savings by plugging leakages and facilitating standardization across post-phase contracting lifecycle

^{Spotlight on AI assistants for Seamless Contracting}

Assistant #1 Data Extractor: Converts contracts into data points to drive insights. Extract contract terms, clauses, obligations, with context from all contracts to unlock deeper insights.  

Assistant #2 Risk Analyzer: Gives risk scores via classifying contract clauses as high, medium, or low risk in real-time. Offers suggestions and alternatives to mitigate risks.

Assistant #3 Data Explorer: It answers any contract question in seconds. Provides instant answers to specific questions about single contracts or the entire contract repository.

Assistnat#4 Workflow Operator: Orchestrate workflows that adapt to the unique needs of every business relationship, system, information, and people involved. Enable self-serve intakes across IT, HR, CRM, etc.

Assistant #5 Report Builder: It generates on-demand reports and dashboards. Turns contract data and performance insights into impactful, detailed reports through a simple, conversational interface.  

^Conclusion

Intelligent Contract Management (ICM) revolutionizes contract handling by leveraging AI intelligence to extract actionable insights, streamline workflows, and enhance efficiency. Unlike traditional systems, ICM integrates Intelligent Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) and Intelligent Contract Performance Management (CPM) to automate tasks, ensure compliance, and uncover hidden savings. Platforms like SimpliContract's ICM transform the contracting process, enabling legal and procurement teams to focus on strategic work and drive business value. Embracing ICM can significantly improve productivity and operational effectiveness in modern enterprises.

‍Explore how this platform can transform your legal and procurement teams’ journey driving revenue goals. Book a demo .

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